3D Animation Basics 02 – Walk, Jump & Dance by Jorge Vigara

This is the step after the bouncing ball where things get real. You take a simple character rig and learn how to make it walk, jump, and dance with believable weight, clean timing, and actual personality.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• How to block the golden poses of a walk: contact, down, passing, and up
• How to sell weight shift and balance in a full walk cycle
• How to animate a jump with anticipation, takeoff, airtime, and landing
• How to use squash and stretch and overlapping action without breaking the rig
• How to time a short dance loop to feel rhythmic and alive

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic understanding of animation principles, comfortable navigating a 3D viewport and setting keyframes
• Tools: 3D animation software like Maya, 3-button mouse
• Hardware: PC capable of running Maya, minimum 8GB RAM

📝 Description

This course picks up right where bouncing balls leave off. No more spheres. You are working with a full character now, which means hips, chest, arms, head, and feet all have to agree with each other. Jorge keeps it simple: nail the golden poses first, then worry about polish.

The walk section is the meat of it. You will learn why a good walk cycle lives or dies on the contact and passing positions, how low the down pose should really go, and how to keep the root moving forward without that ice-skating look. Lots of focus on weight shift and clean silhouettes.

Then you jump. Literally. The jump teaches you anticipation and force – how to crouch to store energy, how to track the root arc through takeoff and airtime, and how to land without making the character look like a bag of bricks. You will play a lot with spacing, squash and stretch, and overlapping action on the arms and torso.

The dance part ties it all together. It is short, fun, and harder than it looks. You have to keep balance while hitting rhythm changes and transitioning between keys smoothly. Great practice for performance and for learning how to cheat poses so they read well on camera.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Beginners who finished a bouncing-ball intro and want to move to character movement
• Self-taught animators whose walks look floaty, stiff, or out of balance

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Jorge Vigara is a professional character animator and founder of Animawarriors. He has spent years animating and teaching body mechanics for games and film, and built the Animawarriors platform to teach animation the practical way – through doing, not just theory.

🏁 Final Result

• A loopable character walk cycle, a full-body jump with anticipation and recovery, and a short dance performance piece ready for your starter reel.